Recent Posts:

Rob Day: July 29, 2011, 1:39 PM

Just got back from attending Dealcatch earlier this week. My thanks and congrats to Chrysalix, and co-sponsors Nixon Peabody and Cascadia Capital, for a really productive (and fun!) networking event. Lots of opportunities to catch up with fellow cleantech investors, talk about specific deals, discuss industry trends, etc. More firms should hold events like that; it has to be pretty valuable for them.

Being there also really helped illustrate a contrast I've observed between institutional venture investors and many (but not all) family offices I've run across over the past few years: the willingness to actively engage in such conversations with each other.

Rob Day: July 23, 2011, 2:36 PM

Information-based cleantech is an emerging "next big thing" in the sector.

During most of the last decade, cleantech VCs were putting a lot of capital into the production of physical commodities -- proprietary ways of turning photons into kilowatt-hours, or biomass into liquid fuels, etc. It takes a lot of capital and time to successfully bring such commodity-production innovations to market. And then, after all that time, effort and money, you're chasing commodity price curves. This isn't to say that there haven't been and won't be successful efforts in such investments. But it's unclear how these investments fit the traditional venture capital model, and indeed a lot of capital...

Rob Day: July 13, 2011, 9:08 AM

The report counts up the number of "clean economy" jobs by sector, painting a picture of an increasingly important set of markets and employers in the U.S. Hopefully, data points like these will continue to highlight the existing and growing importance of our sector.

How are those IPOs from back then doing now? A123 is trading way down, Codexis is down significantly, Tesla is a little bit up, Amyris is quite a bit up, PetroAlgae is a pink sheet, and Gevo lowered their offering price but has been fairly flat since the IPO. So it's a mixed bag, not a resounding set of successes from which to draw inspiration. And yet, here it is...

Rob Day: June 22, 2011, 9:34 AM

First of all, a congrats to the guys at Greentown Labs for their grand opening last night; the event was a great success. I wrote about them and their role a while back, and I still am very impressed with how they're bringing a collaborative -- and cheap! -- approach to getting things actually built and implemented, without taking tens of millions of dollars of venture capital to do so. The startups at Greentown Labs are applying a "guerrilla cleantech" model to what they're doing that really undermines the "cleantech is always capital-intensive" argument I've been hearing a lot of these days from my fellow cleantech investors. So cheers to the guys and gals at Greentown Labs on...

Rob Day: June 13, 2011, 9:01 AM

The single most significant reason my firm passes on venture-stage investment opportunities is because of management teams.

I've heard some cleantech investors say things like, "All I care about is the technology; I can replace the team." That may be a valid approach, but it's just not ours. In cleantech, it's as yet unproven that the technology is really the single biggest determining factor of investment success. The innovation may be special today, but with the innovation cycle outpacing the commercialization cycle in many cleantech sectors, quite often today's breakthrough innovation is next year's also-ran. There are a million ways to turn photons into kilowatt-hours, for...

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About Cleantech Investing:

Rob Day is a Partner with Black Coral Capital, based in Boston. He has been a cleantech private equity investor since 2004, and acts or has served as a Director, Observer and advisory board member to multiple companies in the energy tech and related sectors. The views expressed on this blog are those of Rob, not necessarily the views of any of his colleagues and affiliated organizations. Contact Rob at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

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